A History Of Islamist Militancy In Pakistani Punjab Pakistan’s Punjab Province is home to some of the world’s most insidious terrorist groups and Islamist political organizations. Islamist and jihadist groups, organized under different Islamic sects, have flourished in Punjab and among Punjabis elsewhere. The roots of Islamist militancy in the Muslim Punjab can be traced to the Muslim revolt against the Hindu Maharaja of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in July 1931. The revolt gave birth to the Majlis-Ahrar-Islam (Ahrars for short) in the British Punjab. The Ahrars have served as a model for all subsequent Deobandi, and arguably Salafist, Islamist/jihadist groups that give and take lives in the name of religion….. Read more
Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics (World Anthropology) The public sphere of the Manchester Muslim diaspora is a place of intense local micro-politics of honour and shame, debated in the globalized language of world affairs, and dramatically enacted through public performance. Pnina Werbner reveals a multi-centred world among Manchester Pakistanis, a locally created diasporic public space which appropriates and combines travelling ideas and images from a variety of sources into meaningful moral allegories. British South Asian Muslims became visible in the protests mobilized against The Satanic Verses, during which Pakistani immigrants abandoned the role of a…. Read more
Pakistan: A Hard Country. Anatol Lieven This title was selected for the “Daily Telegraph” and “Independent” Books Of the Year. In the past decade Pakistan has emerged as a country of immense importance. Large, heavily populated, strategically placed between Iran, Afghanistan and India, Pakistan has since its creation just over sixty years ago been pulled in several different, irreconcilable directions. In the wake of Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, Osama Bin Laden’s presence in its unpoliceable border areas, its shelter of the Afghan Taliban, and the spread of terrorist attacks by groups based in Pakistan to London, Bombay and New York, there is a clear need to understand this remarkable and highly contradictory place. Far…. Read more
Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself A volatile nation at the heart of major cultural, political, and religious conflicts in the world today, Pakistan commands our attention. Yet more than six decades after the country’s founding as a Muslim democracy, it continues to struggle over its basic identity, alliances, and direction. In Playing with Fire, acclaimed journalist Pamela Constable peels back layers of contradiction and confusion to reveal the true face of modern Pakistan.In this richly reported and movingly written chronicle, Constable takes us on a panoramic tour of contemporary Pakistan, exploring the fears and frustrations, dreams and beliefs, that animate the lives of ordinary citizens in this nuclear-armed nation…. Read more
The Pakistani Bride: A Novel As a youth, Qasim leaves his tribal village in the remote Himalayas for the plains. Caught up in the strife surrounding the creation of Pakistan, he takes an orphaned girl for his daughter and brings her to the bustling, decadent city of Lahore. Amid the pungent bazaars and crowded streets, Qasim makes his fortune and a home for the two of them. As the years pass, Qasim grows nostalgic about his life in the mountains while his hopelessly romantic teenage daughter, Zaitoon, imagines Qasim’s homeland as a region of tall, kindly men who roam the Himalayas like gods. Impulsively, Qasim promises his daughter in marriage to a tribesman, but Zaitoon’s fantasy soon becomes a grim reality of unquestioning obedience…. Read more
